Chilean Miners Alive

Over the past few days US media have reported on yet another major mining accident, this time in Chile, where a cave-in trapped some 33 miners. On August 23, our egg host in Chile, Fernando Erbetta Doyharcabal sent an email with the subject line "(Another) miracle in Chile," describing the discovery that all of the miners are alive, and the celebration this inspired in Chile.

Perhaps you have already heard that a miracle ocurred yesterday here in Chile.

18 days ago, 33 miners got trapped into a copper mine after a landslide literally buried them alive. This happened in Copiapó, in the north of our country.

Yesterday Sunday 22nd, after 17 days of non-stop work, a probe of only 6 inches in diameter reached the tunnel where the miners supposedly had escaped to (688 meters deep!). And when the technical staff took the probe back to the surface, it had two little pieces of paper attached with messages: "All of us are OK in the shelter". They were alive!

The news ran in minutes through all our country (and the world) and people celebrated here as if we had won the Soccer World Cup, children waving Chilean flags, cars honking on the streets, and so on.

All of that happened yesterday mainly since our early morning when we knew that the probe had reached the tunnel (11:00 UTC) until our evening when we had certainty that the miners were alive and OK (23:00 UTC), with one good news following the other. We lived a whole day of real hapiness and spiritual communion indeed.

The rescue operation will take at least two months but the miners know that and are prepared to resist. Today they will begin to receive the first liquid foods through the probe and they also have had phone communication.

Our Chilean egg has been working normally since last days of July, so maybe it detected the beautiful emotional atmosphere that we experienced yesterday here in Chile. It would be wonderful to know that. Unfortunately I am still not able to get the data and process them adequately. So if you or someone in your team could help us, it would be nice.

The GCP event was set for 11:00 to 23:00 UTC as specified by Fernando. The result is Chisquare 43830.482 on 43200 df, for p = 0.016 and Z = 2.137.

Chilean Miners
Alive

In response to Fernando's particular interest in the behavior of the Santiago Egg, I extracted the data for this individual device and plotted it together with the whole network data. The result is notable -- the two traces are almost a mirror image of each other, with Egg 2080 showing as strong a trend as the full network, but in the opposite direction. This means that during the event the variance measure for the single device was consistently small, less than expectation, whereas for the whole network, the measure was consistently larger than chance expectation. Please note, as explained in the paragraph following the figure, single event analyses or those for single Eggs can't be reliably interpreted.

Chilean Miners
Alive

It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from noise. This means that every "success" might be largely driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect can be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of similar analyses.


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